|
9309d8e
|
Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
8b1c71e
|
Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
71760e0
|
Still, a living, breathing human being--even a boneheaded or barely articulate one--conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering--what Shakespeare called the 'poor, bare, forked animal'--compels us all; we're all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
b16a940
|
Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.
|
|
memoir
memoirs
|
Mary Karr |
|
92f5a1f
|
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain The
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
a0809b6
|
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
5030803
|
What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
f1db379
|
for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
7c91d17
|
Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot--mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness"--which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which"
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
3f3e46d
|
I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today..
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
dd97b81
|
A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird's black shiny eyes.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
a7a7fe1
|
I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn't notice it at all." To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it."
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
0258b92
|
Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
46a3d3b
|
She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it's a schoolkid she's checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
85351dd
|
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
c0ed90b
|
But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball abou..
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
2926a07
|
No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self - your neat analyses and tidy excuses... Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. " p. xxi"
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
c55150d
|
I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course - I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, ho..
|
|
literature
student
|
Mary Karr |
|
d51d268
|
I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man's] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. William Faulkner
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
b30d18b
|
Then the game became guessing where the storm would hit, or, in local parlance, "go in," as if it were some stray relative in search of lodging."
|
|
the-south
|
Mary Karr |
|
1d7fb4c
|
No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)"
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
a4f3e27
|
was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
02061c3
|
It sometimes seems to me like we're not supposed to notice that Shug's colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug's being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody's difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man's skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling. Daddy
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
6edd901
|
No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
38c8d99
|
whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
5df862e
|
The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not eating the stuff could no longer be read. "If swallowed--" each of the cans said, then there was just a wordless scorch mark as warning. At"
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
2357dbb
|
her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
43cd37e
|
The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
d6d7a05
|
Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he'd made and comparing it for size and integrity to his drool spot from the day before. For
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
9b53c1a
|
Then it hits me. I'm actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and slungover mornings did I worship at this altar, emptying myself of poison. And yet to pray to something above me, something invisible, had--before now--seemed degrading.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
fcd5c04
|
It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
67e0117
|
nothing matters but the quality of the affection-- in the end--that has carved the trace in the mind dove
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
631ab32
|
There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig's mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starving To Death.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
7e27a87
|
I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought "easy."
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
a8c496b
|
Leechfield Will Grease The Planet!
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
c51c471
|
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to raped.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
5e3a124
|
As for the actual validity of the notion [of] an immovable self, ever-firm, you're there only by half, at best... You'll spend decades trying to will 'same self' into being. But you'll keep shape-shifting. Probably everyone must, so long as the body's treading sod or drawing breath. What's unalterable as bronze is the image of your radiant friend that morning barefoot on the porch, with sun in her rampant hair. She's holding out the bowl o..
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
97947a7
|
God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie. I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase or . That has a neo-Nazi ring to it. I like the Disney version. I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she's a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify. Let's eat a cookie and pray for each other's disordered attachments, she s..
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
d4578c9
|
I ALMOST FELT A WEIRD POWER OVER MOTHER DURING SUCH TIME. SHE HAD A HOLD ON ME, AT LEAST. AND HER GRIP FELT LIKE SHE WOULD HANG ON NO MATTER WHAT I YANKED HER THROUGH. BY THIS TIME IT WAS HURRICANE SEASON.
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
1918d6f
|
VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God Ninety percent of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath, says God through the manhole covers, but you want magic, to win the lottery you never bought a ticket for. (Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace the suffering.) The voice never panders, offers no five-year plan, no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy white beard hooked over ears. It is small and fond and local. Don't look for your init..
|
|
poetry
wisdom
|
Mary Karr |
|
c5bca08
|
sister was. But I couldn't resist such a clear shot. So I said her
|
|
|
Mary Karr |
|
49189fd
|
I don't know whether it was that night or some other I found the soliloquy from Richard the Second. I only know that finding it let me sail off some blind cliff face into full-blown flight: --Of comfort no man speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
|
|
|
Mary Karr Cherry |
|
11189b7
|
I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger."
|
|
flow
growth
|
Mary Karr |
|
7323d97
|
Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: "You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter"
|
|
female-success
mother
pretty
smart
|
Mary Karr |